SmokeSound

There was a boy A very strange enchanted boy They say he wandered very far, very far Over land and sea I had completely forgotten! I had remembered Nat King Cole. Remembering Nat King Cole is part of the furniture of my life; period furniture. Yesterday I found a couple of CDs with his songs. I had been looking for them. "We have three," the clerk said, and she led me to the table where they were, flipping to the back of the display. And today, driving home from the grocer's, I heard what first I heard when I was in high school. By almost anyone's reckoning, that was a while ago. The first dozen songs, or so, came like something not quite forgotten, but then Nat King Cole sang:   There was a boy! A little shy and sad of eye But very wise was he A magic day he passed my way And while we spoke of many things Fools and kings This he said to me The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return And I am eighty...

It was my obligation, as a first-year college student, to have to attend daily chapel services in the gymnasium:  it was a church college.  All of us conscripts were seated on one side of the gym, and the speaker stood out on the floor behind an old-fashioned microphone stand.  Had it been a really good P.A. system (do people still say, "P.A.", as in "Public Address"?) all of us reluctant disciples might be in church today, but it was just a wire attached to suitcases of sound somewhere.  We missed a lot of the words; probably the most important ones. As a result, most speakers shouted at the microphone.  It was not a pretty experience. One faculty member, whom I remember as one of the most interesting and stimulating profs I have ever had, had come to believe that he could "project" his voice quite nicely without the benefit of microphone and amplifiers.  He refused to stand behind what looked like a Pontiac hood ornament--in fact, deliberately walk...

I thought, once again, that I would try, once again, to fry chicken.  As with a lifetime of trying, again and again, to grill a steak properly, and rarely succeeding, I find it easiest to blame my tools so, according to recipe directions, I decided to get a large, cast iron Dutch Oven. I recalled that a local sportsman's store had a rather large collection of Lodge pots.  I assume campers like those grand pots with feet that you can set right on the coals, and heap more coals onto the lid.  But I knew they also had enameled cast iron pots, too. I was opening a box to determine how deep the pot was when a clerk came by and offered to help.  "Those are wonderful pots!", he said.  "I bought one for my mother and she uses it all the time." I was holding the lid in my hand; a cast iron lid:  "Your mother must be pretty strong", I replied. "She is," he said, "but I think she just leaves it on the stove." After scrubbing the p...

For years, during which time we hop-scotched our way in and out of Tucson, tending to our education and jobs, we took short breaks from chores and drove toward Arizona's southern border where it meets Mexico.  Sometimes we crossed into Nogales, Sonora for special meals, and sometimes we only drove as far as Tubac, a small arts town less than an hour from home. Sometimes, at first, and always, as we became familiar with the territory, we watched for Amado, a community just north of Tubac.  We knew nothing about the village except that we could see its longhorns from the freeway. Yesterday we drove to Tubac, again, intending to buy a ceramic pot for our backyard, and to have lunch at Elvira's, while we were there.  This time, perhaps only for the second time in all those years, we decided to watch for, and explore, the longhorns, again. We had not intended to go into the restaurant/bar, but it was a tad sad, nonetheless, to learn that the bar had closed, probably b...

What is this "curvy" business? Nobody is fat anymore.  Some people are "curvy". Nobody says men are curvy.  I feel left out. I have some very nice curves around my waist, and I don't particularly admire them, even when I can rather easily get a good grip. My friends don't say I am "curvy": they say I am getting kind of fat. "You are getting kind of fat!", Lyle said to me. Lyle wasn't curvy.  He was as hard as a rock. I tried to suck it up and hold it in, but I found it hard to talk, like that. And why don't people say . . . oh, the women's track team is curvy? Are they missing something we can see? Sumo wrestlers are really  curvy! I suppose one might say, "Plus Sized". There are no curvy pole vaulters. But, then, this is an election year, isn't it?

I do enjoy Sarah Palin--she is a fresh of breath air--but it is Michele Bachmann who hugs at my tart strings. If for no other reason, and there are a lot of other reasons, our years spent in The Twin Cities became, if not golden at least polished brass because of Michele.  The hot, soggy, summer days might weigh one down, and the crust of crystal winter snow blowing back from being blasted into the northwest wind might freeze one's face in ice, but on those days when I made it back into the house alive and well, the news was certain to share some wisdom from Michele. She has done it, again!  Even from the distant reaches of the Sonoran Desert, it is like salvation to hear that Michele has said something--my god!  almost anything!--to raise the life of the mind to soaring, ankle-level heights.  Now she has explained what it means to have, and to live in a nation with, religious freedom. Religious freedom is when a Jew can say, "Merry Christmas!"  It makes...

I have been thinking about that Camelot line:   "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot!" For several years I taught a January term course that we read and invested ourselves in, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.  We dug as deeply as history would allow us into the real Arthur, who is hardly there, if at all, who might have been an officer left over from the Roman occupation of the British Isles.  We read as many of the sources of the grand story of King Arthur as we could digest fairly, and tried to understand what those stories were all about. They were all about a time that never was.  When Winston Churchill was asked if the stories about King Arthur were true, he said:  "They are true!  They are all true, or they ought to be, and more and better besides!" The Arthurian stories are about what the British would like to be; not so much as what was actually true, but ab...

I hope it changes, and given that Mr. Trump is in charge, she might make an appearance covered in gold leaf, and we might mistake her for a door clapper, but the word this morning is that Sarah Palin is not scheduled to speak at the RNC Convention. Ah, be still, my heart! As all of us are anxious to admit, I am no politician, but it seems to me that an appearance by Sister Sarah, possibly with a turkey on a short leash, would bring the Convention in Quicken Loans Arena to its feet! Donald Trump will speak, of coarsely. It will be great!  Great!  You won't believe how great it will be! It will be so great it will make your head spin! Everyone will say how great it will be!  Just wait! You can count on it being great! And Mr. Trump's whole family will speak. His kids will speak.  Several of his wives may speak: not all of them; only if it was in the pre-nup. Tim Tebow will be there.  That will be great! Several Republican Senators will be ...

Yesterday Barack Obama, and his predecessor, George W. Bush, spoke to the nation, and probably a good share of the world, about the shootings in Dallas when five policemen were killed.  Both Presidents were eloquent about the divisions in our nation between people of differing skin color, and how that affects law enforcement, or the failure of it, and civility. President Obama, especially, was eloquent about the plain fact that it is not a police vs. civilian division; that racism lies deep within all of us, and that all of us need to confront and overcome it:   all of us. Last night, on what we used to call a news channel, we listened to a commentator complain that the President was so one-sided in his comments, and that he wished he had been even-handed, and not so-against-the-police. "Whaa, whaa?", we said.  "Did he listen, at all?  Can he not understand plain English?" Well, of course he can.  The problem is not grammar or syntax.  The problem ...

Saguaros have almost become cartoons. When old, they are huge, heavy, monarchs of the kingdom they occupy in the Sonora. But in souvenir shops, they are trinkets, wearing Christmas tree lights and cowboy hats. Were I standing next to a saguaro such as the one at right, I would not even show at the base, unless I were wearing Christmas tree lights and a cowboy hat. When Mari's Iowa-born dad first saw a Saguaro, here in Tucson, he asked, as an Iowa farmer might, "What are they good for?" No cobs.  No way to bale them.  Full of water, they won't burn. Oddly enough, tiny young saguaros are easily sunburned, toasting like an Iowan in the Sonoran sunblast. People who plant tiny saguaros on their property often put up little tents, little metal roofs, to shade them. In their natural state, young saguaros survive best when they find themselves rooting under the shade of a nurse tree. A nurse tree is an established tree providing shade under which other l...

Did I mention that I live in Arizona? Yesterday we went to a small cafe for lunch. We needed something to fight off starvation, and to get out of the house. A gentleman came in with a T-shirt that explained that he was a patriot and that he was sorry we were spineless. He had a leather packet on his belt, and from time-to-time he cradled it in his hand and looked around the room. I am not sure I have ever felt so . . . oh . . . I don't know . . . secure, I guess. I think I am old-fashioned. It makes me feel spineless when I stand in line at the grocery check-out behind the butt of somebody's handgun: kind of jelly-boned weak in the knees; unpatriotic. I know that if something happens I will be standing right next to a guy in a gunfight.

We need a third political party, convention and all.  Not a pretend, make-believe party appealing to people who are allergic to crop dust and taxes and in favor of whales, but a credible alternative to Republicans and Democrats. We have Libertarians, but they are all dentists and used car salesmen, and maybe there is actually a Green Party barely visible in the smog.  Lots of people call themselves Independents, but that usually means they are just disgusted Republicans or Democrats.  Disgust does not make a party.  Disgust makes blog entries. If we had three or four Parties, plus Sarah Palin up in Wasilla, who all alone could be the membership of the Rogue Party, then when Congress met it would have to decide how to get a majority together, and that would take conversation and compromise.  And while the arguments might be ludicrous, it might happen that we will begin to realize how we really think about things.  Let us not pretend that para...

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

I used to teach in a small liberal arts college; a very successful liberal arts college.  Had it not been successful, it would have been a shrinking liberal arts college.  Nobody wanted that, but a lot of people did not want to change, either.  Almost every year, someone proposed that the college should not become larger because that would change the nature of the college.  And that was so.  But the assumption was that what the college  used to be,  or perhaps  precisely what it had become,  was what it should remain. That the college had been founded by church members was significant because there is something in that particular form of religion that is suspicious of change.  All one has to do is to imagine what a congregation would do if the preacher were to say that he used to believe in . . . oh, angels, or heaven, or a god who knew everything and who lived forever, but that he had changed his mind.  And especially in thos...

We live in interesting times. Troubled times.  Turning times. I saw one of those "time-lapse" depictions of human history, recently. It depicted the whole globe, as if from space, with lights blinking on to depict the rise of cities.  Until rather recently, cities, almost entirely, first show up more-or-less in temperate zones, like a belt around the earth. For a long time, cities clustered there where we are fighting wars today. The Tigris/Euphrates river system was especially active.  From Northern Africa (think of the Nile River system, and up across what is now Syria and Iraq, to Iran (think of Babylon, and Assyria, and Persia),  and even to India, cities were founded, like obvious evidence that we were no more hunters and gatherers. The tension between Christianity and Islam is not that old, but it originates in the same belt of cities, and it has been active for centuries.  The family squabbles among Jews and Christians and Mohammedans spilled ...

Almost certainly, there has to be a political party realignment in our future. "Realignment" may not be an adequate term.  It sounds too much like everybody is standing in the wrong line, and that we will have to swap places.  I don't think there are many people, other than some Republicans who are dismayed by Donald Trump, who simply want to swap lines. In the Republican Party, there seems to be a lot of people who think the Grand Old Party has been hijacked by dolts and racists.  One might as well add sexists and homophobes and people who think only men should be allowed to wear long white robes that hide their identity.   It is not clear whether the more traditional Republican Party standard bearers simply want the upstarts who have taken over the Party to leave, or whether they should themselves leave and build something new. Similar tectonic fault lines affect the Democratic Party, too, although the shifts there are more familiar.  Hilary Clinton is ...